第73章

"I'm glad to hear it, sir," said Marner, with gathering excitement; "but repentance doesn't alter what's been going on for sixteen year.Your coming now and saying "I'm her father" doesn't alter the feelings inside us.It's me she's been calling her father ever since she could say the word.""But I think you might look at the thing more reasonably, Marner,"said Godfrey, unexpectedly awed by the weaver's direct truth-speaking."It isn't as if she was to be taken quite away from you, so that you'd never see her again.She'll be very near you, and come to see you very often.She'll feel just the same towards you.""Just the same?" said Marner, more bitterly than ever."How'll she feel just the same for me as she does now, when we eat o' the same bit, and drink o' the same cup, and think o' the same things from one day's end to another? Just the same? that's idle talk.

You'd cut us i' two."

Godfrey, unqualified by experience to discern the pregnancy of Marner's simple words, felt rather angry again.It seemed to him that the weaver was very selfish (a judgment readily passed by those who have never tested their own power of sacrifice) to oppose what was undoubtedly for Eppie's welfare; and he felt himself called upon, for her sake, to assert his authority.

"I should have thought, Marner," he said, severely--"I should have thought your affection for Eppie would make you rejoice in what was for her good, even if it did call upon you to give up something.

You ought to remember your own life's uncertain, and she's at an age now when her lot may soon be fixed in a way very different from what it would be in her father's home: she may marry some low working-man, and then, whatever I might do for her, I couldn't make her well-off.You're putting yourself in the way of her welfare;and though I'm sorry to hurt you after what you've done, and what I've left undone, I feel now it's my duty to insist on taking care of my own daughter.I want to do my duty."It would be difficult to say whether it were Silas or Eppie that was more deeply stirred by this last speech of Godfrey's.Thought had been very busy in Eppie as she listened to the contest between her old long-loved father and this new unfamiliar father who had suddenly come to fill the place of that black featureless shadow which had held the ring and placed it on her mother's finger.Her imagination had darted backward in conjectures, and forward in previsions, of what this revealed fatherhood implied; and there were words in Godfrey's last speech which helped to make the previsions especially definite.Not that these thoughts, either of past or future, determined her resolution--_that_ was determined by the feelings which vibrated to every word Silas had uttered; but they raised, even apart from these feelings, a repulsion towards the offered lot and the newly-revealed father.

Silas, on the other hand, was again stricken in conscience, and alarmed lest Godfrey's accusation should be true--lest he should be raising his own will as an obstacle to Eppie's good.For many moments he was mute, struggling for the self-conquest necessary to the uttering of the difficult words.They came out tremulously.

"I'll say no more.Let it be as you will.Speak to the child.

I'll hinder nothing."